"Mami at Her Vanity"

"I watched as she tried on faces before an evening out-a charity ball,a fiesta de cumpleaños, a commandreception in the dictator's honor-dabbing, brushing, preparingher company face to put on display,the darkened brows, the red mouthdrawn on her mouth, the familiar,beloved face already slipping away to belong to the world, turning thisway and that in the three-panelledvanity mirror, in which I could also see my face, cupped in my hands, studying her, touching, retouching,"

"faces she brushed over, colored and covered up: the face of terror at the news of a cousin shot, an uncle's body found in a wrecked car; the punishment face enraged at the will I had, locking me up in the closet until I sobbed, promising to be good if she let me out; the nostril-flaring face of a swallowed laugh over a joke she couldn't share with us;"

Narrator watches a woman prepare for social events by changing her expressions like masks, applying makeup and studying herself in a three‑panelled mirror. The woman tries faces for different occasions while concealing pain, grief, anger, and private joy. Specific faces surface: terror at relatives' deaths, punitive rage that isolates the narrator, a suppressed laugh, a playful childlike face, and a solitary inward face that belongs only to herself. The woman continually alters these faces to present a company persona, while the narrator searches for the woman's authentic self. Memory remains as the only mirror capable of recalling the face of her absence.

Read at The New Yorker